So Many Sounds, but Jazz Is the CoreHerbie Hancock Is the Emissary of an Art FormA Kennedy Center honor and a new 34-CD boxed set honor Herbie Hancock’s many triumphs.
LOS ANGELES — Herbie Hancock, a pianist of sparkling touch and brisk intuition, has often seemed like a figure rushing ever onward, and the direction in which he has increasingly hurled himself is globe-trotting cultural diplomacy. “I don’t consider myself a spokesperson for jazz,” he said recently, implying that he has bigger concerns.
Seated in the living room of his casually elegant home here in West Hollywood, not far from an alcove crowded with Grammy Awards — more than a dozen of them, including one for album of the year — Mr. Hancock, 73, was in a cordial mood, quick with a disarming laugh. He was also still jet-lagged from an East Asian tour that had ended in copious meetings with government officials about International Jazz Day, his signature initiative as a good will ambassador for Unesco. Fortunately, there was a stretch of relative calm ahead before he was due in Washington, for this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, where he’ll be among a class of five honorees that includes Billy Joel and Shirley MacLaine. (The gala concert, which happens next Sunday, will be broadcast by CBS on Dec. 29.)
Mr. Hancock’s eminence in jazz goes hand in hand with his stature in the realm of pop, to a degree that nobody else has ever managed. After redefining the language of post-bop piano in the 1960s, he delved into funk, electronic music and pop-R&B, leaving his mark at nearly every turn. A handsome new boxed set, “The Complete Columbia Album Collection 1972-1988” (Legacy), gathers his sweep on 34 CDs; among the albums are “Head Hunters,” a jazz-funk experiment that has sold more than a million copies, and “Future Shock,” whose hit single, “Rockit,” became an early hip-hop touchstone and a surrealist fixture of the frontier era of MTV. In the same spirit, Mr. Hancock’s next album will probably be a collaboration with Flying Lotus, the head-trippy electronic producer, and Thundercat, an affiliated electric bass virtuoso and vocalist.
That Mr. Hancock has always considered jazz his core — whatever the style he happened to be playing, and however shrill the objections of his critics — can be chalked up to his elastic understanding of the art form. “The thing that keeps jazz alive, even if it’s under the radar,” he said, “is that it is so free and so open to not only lend its influence to other genres, but to borrow and be influenced by other genres. That’s the way it breathes.”
Mr. Hancock studied classical music as a child, but growing up in Chicago, he couldn’t help hearing his share of blues. At the time, his tastes ran more toward doo-wop: “I heard the Ravens, and the Five Thrills, and the Penguins, and the Midnighters.” Jazz gripped him after he heard a classmate’s piano trio at a school talent show.
He enrolled as an engineering major at Grinnell College, though it wasn’t long before he was discovered by the trumpeter Donald Byrd. After appearing on several of Byrd’s Blue Note albums, he made his own debut on the label, in 1962. And for anyone who has decried the pull of commercialism in his career, it’s worth remembering that the first track on that album was “Watermelon Man,” a soulful tune that fast became a hit.
Mr. Hancock was hired by Miles Davis the following year, becoming the harmonic linchpin in one of the most accomplished small groups in jazz history. “He is one of those rare people in the music that really created a shift,” the pianist Geri Allen said of Mr. Hancock’s work in that band. “After him, everything changed in terms of what people thought the piano was capable of. His knowledge base was so inclusive and thorough, and beside that was his absolute virtuosity and humanity.”
Like Wayne Shorter, his fellow Davis alumnus and closest musical peer, Mr. Hancock has practiced Nichiren Buddhism since the early 1970s. To get to his impressive home studio — a state-of-the-art bunker packed with keyboards, computer equipment and mixing consoles, and backed up by many terabytes of digital storage — you first pass through the room that holds a modest shrine, where he chants every day.
Mr. Hancock credits his religious practice for many things, including his artistic compass. “I think more about purpose in making a record now,” he said. “What message do I want to give? And the messages are not about music. They’re about life.” In a similar vein, he decided years ago to refrain from self-classification. “I realized that if I perceive myself as a musician, somehow there’s an invisible barrier between myself and people who aren’t musicians. But if I define myself as a human being, all the barriers disappear.”
Just posted a little here, bet the box set is amazing.
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